Irvine Welsh's Paperback Picks
Recommendations from your Favourite Authors
Irvine Welsh recently visited our fiction room and chose a few of his favourite paperbacks.
Edinburgh born and bred, Welsh is the author of eleven novels and four short story collections as well as several stage and screen plays. His often experimental work looks at questions of free-will, class division and Scottish identity.
The Sunlight Pilgrims
Dr Jenni Fagan
The climate is changing and most people have fled to the south. Stubborn strangers Constance and Dylan meet in the highlands of Scotland and begin to forge a new life there.
The Amateurs
John Niven
Dark and hilarious, The Amateurs is set in Scotland and tells the story of Gary, his brother, his wife, and her lover when, by some strange stroke of luck, all of their futures come to depend on Gary's golf swing.
Boxer, Beetle
Ned Beauman
This madcap murder mystery is an international, intergenerational comic romp through the history of 20th century eugenics. The protagonist is a Nazi-memorabilia collector with a permanently fishy smell...
Milkman
Anna Burns
Irvine described this as 'unlike other booker winners.' Milkman is a brilliant, funny, unsettling portrait of a divided city, and of an obsessive, destructive relationship.
California Fire And Life
Don Winslow
A suspicious insurance claim leads the fearless Jack Wade into California's criminal underworld...
Glister
John Burnside
Teenage boys go missing from a post-industrial town, but no one seems to care. Read Irvine's own review here.